Uncle Sam should learn to hack

BusinessWeek: “With the specter of the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters
looming large in the minds of lawmakers, the cry to ban U.S. exports
of sophisticated encryption software has risen anew. Encryption, or
cryptography (crypto for short), is the science of devising codes that
cloak messages in secret language. It involves using complex
algorithms to mix characters of a message with other characters or
values in a seemingly nonsensical way. The result is gibberish that
even the biggest supercomputers struggle to decode.”